Catch 26
CAROL PRISANT

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

www.harpercollins.co.uk

HarperImpulse an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperImpulse 2016

Copyright © Carol Prisant 2016

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Holly Macdonald

Carol Prisant asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780008185367

Version 2016-08-11

FOR DAPHNE

and

FOR CAROLAN

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Before

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

One Year

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Epilogue

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety.”

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2 Scene 2

“Burn with me!

The only music is time,

The only dance is love.”

King of the River, Stanley Kunitz

BEFORE

CHAPTER 1

Standing at her closet, still naked from her shower and wondering what to wear to lunch, Frannie heard Stanley’s key scratch at the front door lock. A draught of biting winter air sliced through their bedroom. Frannie hurried to close the door.

“It’s pretty cold,” she thought she heard him say. “May snow.”

But he managed to catch the bedroom door before it fully closed and he caught her standing there. Oh, God. She tried to cover herself with her hands and arms. He shouldn’t see her like this.

Her husband barely glanced at her as he pushed past to retrieve his glasses from the top of the chest of drawers.

“Why bother?” he said mildly, dropping the glasses into his breast pocket and closing the door behind him.

Moving away from the chill left in the air, Frannie moved slowly towards the bathroom’s full-length mirror. Arms at her sides, she stood. And looked. To see what Stanley had seen.

Her mottled, freckled chest, he’d seen. But they hadn’t known about sun back then, so it was something of a surprise, although she’d never expected these pancaked breasts, either, nor the small mushroom farms growing beneath their awkward, sloppy, weight. And what about the puffy hill of her pale, defenseless stomach that ended in a scraggly patch of pubic hair – some of which was gray, she saw now. How had she not known that pubic hair turns gray? In fact, when Arlene had mentioned it the other morning, she’d been stunned. Although it made a certain sense, she thought. The hair on her head was mostly gray (beneath the dye). Her eyebrows – what was left of them – were gray. She touched them up, but they were gray. Yet how, at sixty-six, could there still have been something so basic she didn’t know? Age was supposed to bring wisdom.

She ran damp palms down her thickened body. No waist, wide hips, fat thighs. When she got to those lumpy thighs, she folded her hands into fists, and her reluctant gaze slid past hairless shins to her sad, bunioned feet with their overlong second toes.

It couldn’t have been many years ago when she’d been slim and supple as a whippet, her hipbones like paired knives and a stomach, not just flat, but absurdly concave. Her skin had been satin back then; her breasts … alright, they’d been unexceptional. Not perky not plush, just a nothing-to-brag-about B cup. But these days – these leftover days – she was into – and even a little out of – a DD. But at twenty, there’d been none of these flesh-colored moles, had there? No veinous freeways, no pinkly larval skin tags. (Who thought up words like “skin-tags” anyway?) With an involuntary groan, Frannie turned toward the window and the late-winter treeline beyond.

Why had she looked?

She sat heavily on the bed and reached for the remote, but it wasn’t there. She felt around the floor, and finding it under one of Stanley’s socks, pushed herself up to one elbow and clicked.

Elizabeth Taylor. There she was.

Frannie leaned gratefully back on the pillows. They smelled of his hair.

Oh yes, there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth, with her perfect, provocative, perfect and large, perfect and movie-star breasts. Elizabeth in Suddenly Last Summer yet again.

The enviable Elizabeth Taylor, dressed in the beautifully fitting couture shift that the madhouse she was confined to apparently issued to inmates.

“I am disturbed,” Liz was saying. “Don’t you think I have every reason to be?”

For sure, Frannie thought. With seven husbands, if anyone does, you do.

I do too.

Planting a fist on either side, Frannie heaved herself up off the bed and walked once again to the window. Was it going to snow? Not today, she entreated the weather gods. She didn’t need snow.

Why had she looked? She leaned her forehead against the glass again.

Turning at last to her dresser, she distractedly plucked up some underwear, and without looking down, stepped into her underpants, ran a thumb around the elastic, shook herself into her bra, then tiptoed into the chilly hall to peer around the living-room door. Stanley had gone out again. For the paper, she thought with relief as she circled the room in her underwear, straightening up and carefully baring the half-full glass of his last night’s cranberry juice to the kitchen. If she were lucky, he wouldn’t be back before she left for lunch with Arlene.

Because Frannie was so looking forward to their lunch today. They were trying out this new Italian place at the Golden Arch Mall. If Stanley got home before she went, though, he’d want to know who she was going out with, what she’d left him to eat, and especially – most vexingly – what time she thought she’d be back.

So peculiar, she thought, this belated desire for her company. She’d actually been a little flattered by it when he’d first retired, and she almost wondered if, somehow, he cared for her again. But six years had passed, and she finally understood: retired men depended on their wives like children. Even when they had computery gadgets to play with and golf magazines to read and sports channels to click through, even when they merely dozed through the long afternoons at home, they still always wanted to know where Mommy had gone. More importantly, when Mommy was coming home.

She might not be right about the children thing, though. She’d never had any.

She had strapped a pillow to herself once, just to get the sense of how it might feel to be pregnant. And she’d bought a baby doll once and hid it away.

She hated to remember that now.

But Stanley would be home any minute. Better hurry up, she thought, opening the closet door.

Too late. He was coming through the front door with the paper.

“I’m hungry. Anything in the fridge?” He limped a little, crossing the living room. He’d pulled a hamstring on the golf course last July. They didn’t kiss.

“Hold on, I’ll take a look.”

Hurrying ahead of him into the kitchen and opening the icebox door (oh God, she still called it an icebox – like her mother did) her back stitched up. She straightened too fast and felt suddenly dizzy.

“Just some of last night’s chicken,” she called back, leaning on the counter for support.

“That’ll be good.”

Stanley had had a heart scare the August before he’d retired. The surgeons had inserted two stents, and now he ate only broccoli and poached chicken. And pills.

“I’ll have that. With some toast. And remember to burn the toast a little, will you? Yesterday you forgot.”

“It’s only 11:10, Stanley. Don’t you want to wait for lunch? You’ll spoil your appetite.”

Readying her smile, Frannie waited in the living room doorway in her robe while he busied himself with throwing open her blue moiré curtains and hooking one of them over the back of her nice French chair. It would wrinkle now, she thought peevishly as she watched her husband, paper in hand, drop into his leather recliner and search, for some moments, for the sweet spot there. She watched as he perched the paper on his paunch and, with both his palms, smoothed the crimped remnants of silvery hair flat against his scalp. His scalp, she saw, silently moving behind him to fix the curtain now, his scalp was even more freckled than her chest. His hands and arms were unpleasantly mottled, too. Golf, she supposed. And no sunscreen. With the light behind his head like this, she could just make out the feathery hairs sprouting from his ears.

Of course, if Stanley looked at her, which he wasn’t doing now and seldom did – he’d have noticed her, well … whiskers. Frannie’s hand moved reflexively to the stubble of her weeks-old chin wax. She’d never mentioned the waxing to him. He’d accuse her of being vain, and he hated vain women. It wasn’t vanity to Frannie, though. It was … maintenance.

And anyhow, she said defensively to the Stanley in her head, she’d never been old before. She was trying to adjust because it felt so foreign. Like adolescence maybe. With wrinkles.

“You still dressing?” he called from behind his paper.

She scurried out of the room and reached for a blouse – any blouse – in the bedroom closet.

“Yes.”

Of course, he hated being old himself. He especially hated his cardiologist, who had pointedly told him he had “to watch.” No salt, no fat, and no Viagra.

Not that Stanley had asked for Viagra.

“No, I won’t,” he belatedly replied. “I won’t ‘spoil my appetite’ – whatever that means – for the thousandth time. I’ll eat again at 1:30 or so. Anyway,” he added triumphantly, “you know Dr. Dietz said several small meals a day.”

Rummaging now for shoes, Frannie heard the self-satisfied rustle-and-snap of his newspaper. Who could argue with the medical establishment, she thought? Not an aging dentist’s wife. But what did “spoiling your appetite” matter anyway in the long run?

And why was she still saying that?

Straightening more slowly this time, she called back, “All right. I’ll give you some chicken for now and make another plate for later. I’m having lunch with Arlene.”

“Oh, you are?” His tenor inched up a notch, edging towards the place where his little-boy whine lived and lay in wait. She imagined him padding toward the bedroom door like Sparky used to do.

Sparky, she hadn’t thought of him in years – what was her problem today?

“What time will you be home?’ he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe 2:30 or so. Maybe we’ll drop by the St. James’ sale afterward. Pick up something for Deb Barkley. She’s in the hospital, you know.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the matter?” The swish of the financial section put paid to Deb Barkley. “Well, don’t be too late.”

For her own thousandth time, Frannie wondered why he always said that. He’d be asleep in his chair no matter when she got home, his head against its back, the newspaper fallen to the floor, his mouth open to end-of-day dust motes.

She smoothed the blouse into the tightish waistband of her tweed skirt and ducked back into the kitchen, hurriedly arranging two plates of pale chicken, some steamed broccoli (no butter, no salt) and a piece of blackened Wonder Bread on her nice blue pottery plates, covering it all with clear plastic wrap. She stepped back and admired her work. It looked almost tasty like that. She left one plate on the counter, the other, at the front of the refrigerator, where he couldn’t possibly miss it. She could hear Elizabeth Taylor again, complaining about her spectacularly skintight white bathing suit.

“Ah cain’t weah that.” Elizabeth fake-laughed, all coy and all jingly and all Southern-belle. “It’s a scandal to the jaybirds!”

“Neither can I, Liz,” she thought, unbuttoning the top button of her skirt.

She clicked the TV off, dabbed a little powder on her forehead, buttoned her gray jacket and grabbed her next-to-best purse, calling as she hurried past his chair, “I’m leaving now, Stanley. Do you mind if I take the Ford?”

“Unhhh. He cleared his throat.

Had she made the bed?

She would check when she got home.

Arlene, her fold-up reading glasses set neatly beside her plate, took a careful mouthful of hot, fried lasagna and turned to look around.

“Lots of business women here,” she said.

And that was when Frannie registered her hair.

“You’ve got a new haircut, Ar! And it’s a different color, too, isn’t it? Let me see!

Almost shyly, Arlene turned her head.

“It’s wonderful! What did you do?”

“Do you really like it?”

“Like it? I can’t believe it!”

Years ago, when they’d been girls, they’d sworn to let careless Nature take her course. It had eventually become a running joke between them, that they’d go cold-turkey together. Live a natural, even organic old age.

But now, here was Arlene with this … fine new hair: all lustrous and silky and waved: all fawn-colored, pineapply fluff, and Frannie felt obscurely that her best friend was cheating. Cheating successfully, too, because something about this haircut – or was it the color? – seemed so perfectly suited to her coloring, her eyes, her neck. Her neck. Her hand flew to her own as she flashed on this morning.

And now here was Arlene, looking so … young.

“Who did you go to?” she asked.

Arlene leaned in, dropping her voice.

“I’ve found this new hairdresser. Linda Thorpe told me about her. She flies into St. Louis from New York a couple of times a month, I think. She’s at The Hair House on Clayton. It’s new.”

A few tables away, a man with a mid-winter tan had turned and seemed to smile their way. At Arlene? At her? Frannie swept her glasses off her nose.

Pathetic, she thought.

“Tell me her name?” she asked offhandedly. “Maybe I’ll try her out.”

“Who?”

“That genie who did your hair. Unless it was a man?”

“Not a Jeannie, you dope. A Randi.” Frannie snorted and rolled her eyes. She was used to Arlene’s sense of humor. “And she’s a woman.”

“‘Randi?’” she mused. “That’s an odd name for a girl. Does she spell it with an ‘I’ or a ‘y’?”

“I think with an ‘I’.”

“Maybe her parents weren’t aware of the double entendre,” she added.

They chuckled together uncertainly. Arlene realigned her silverware.

“Maybe it’s short for Miranda,” Frannie suggested, pleased at having sucked some useful morsel from the usual vacuum of her mind.

“Yes, I’ll bet that’s it. You always know things like that, Fran. Words like that.”

Arlene cupped the bottom-most waves of her hairdo in her palm and fluffed up them the tiniest bit. (Frannie might be smart, the gesture implied, but Arlene had prettier hair.) “Anyway, I wouldn’t count on getting an appointment. She only comes here one day of every month or so, and I know she’s really busy when she’s here.”

Was Arlene a little prickly or was it her own, very peculiar, mood?

“I don’t mind waiting for a month or two, Ar. After all,” she lifted a hank of tired, dark hair. “It’s not as though I haven’t lived with this for years.” She made a face. Arlene smiled.

“Well, don’t tell anyone else on the planet or neither one of us will ever get an appointment again, Fran. And I should tell you that she’s only at The Hair House a few days a year, though I hear she does lots of famous people in New York: Victoria’s Secret models. Sometimes Barbara Walters!”

“Really?” Frannie was impressed.

“She told me that it’s a worldwide franchise and she owns two. Ours, here in St. Louis, and one in New York.”

“Really?” Frannie was doubly impressed. New York!

Arlene seemed mollified. She leaned back in her chair.

“Ready for dessert?”

On her return, Frannie found Stanley asleep in his chair with his “second lunch” still in its transparent wrap in the icebox. She hung up her coat, tiptoed to the bedroom and perched on the edge of the crisply made bed. (Good, she’d remembered.)

Opening her handbag and fingering through her worn brown wallet, she found it: the beauty shop’s number on the back of a Nordstrom’s receipt. She could, of course, wait a month or six weeks if she wanted to. She’d just had color, after all. Still …

She reached for the phone.

“Hair House.” The nasal voice of a twelve-year-old bored receptionist.

“This is Mrs. Stanley Turner. I’m calling for an appointment with Randi. Arlene Mann gave me her name?”

“Hold on a minute. I’ll check the book.”

A longish pause, during which Frannie heard the dull whirring of … blow driers?

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Frannie Turner. I’m friend of Arlene Mann’s.”

Muffled conversation.

“Hold on a minute, would you? I have to check something.”

“Fine.”

It was a full twelve minutes by the nightstand clock, in fact, during which Frannie cleaned scraps of dog-eared papers and receipts out of her wallet and counted her change in her lap and, after that, wandered over to the closet wall to gaze, possibly for the thousandth time, at her cherished print of “Primavera”.

She’d bought it in college, just before her last art history finals. It was a superb reproduction. It had been expensive, too, but she’d treated herself – not just because the image was head-spinningly beautiful, but because the owner of the store had taken the time to point out that Botticelli’s original painting actually represented love, marriage, and fertility.

Love. Marriage. Fertility. She and Stanley had gotten married before she’d had time to do anything with her precious art degree and, of course, married women didn’t work back then. She regretted not having used her education now, she’d enjoyed those classes so. But this print still gave her visceral pleasure, and reminded her every day that art and beauty were the truest joys in a disappointing world. More than once, “Primavera” had saved her.

The phone in her hand sizzled to life.

“Well, you’re really lucky, Mrs. Lerner.”

“It’s Turner.”

“Awesome. Really awesome! Randi says she can fit you in tomorrow at 2:00!”

“Tomorrow! Oh, I am lucky. Thanks so much! So I’ll see you then. Oh, wait.” She was an idiot. “Where are you?”

“We’re on Clayton Road, about a mile past the Starbucks in the Arch shopping strip. Right next to the Schnucks there.”

“Okay. I’ll be there. Thanks!”

For the second time today, she stood before the bathroom mirror. This time, she was grinning foolishly at – she wasn’t sure what. She tugged at some strands of lifeless hair. Bangs? Blonde, like Arlene? Tomorrow she’d be a new Frannie Turner, maybe. Maybe she’d treat herself to a new hairbrush. Or a lipstick.

She returned to the bedroom.

Nothing would really make a difference, though. Not a haircut. Not a color change or a new hairdresser. She’d been here before.

And yet – Frannie made a mental effort. She smoothed the lank brown strands of hair behind her ears, sat on her own side of the bed and, opening her night-table drawer, cupped a well-worn deck of cards in her hand and dealt them out on the bedspread.

Some women ironed clothes to quiet their minds. Some worked crossword puzzles. Frannie preferred her cards: sometimes Chinese Patience, sometimes Solitaire.

She cheated a little at both.

When Stanley coughed himself awake at 5:30, it was dark outside and she was winning.

She swept up the deck, slipped it back in the drawer, and went to the kitchen.

Just a night like every other, she thought. Early dinner – this morning’s chicken and broccoli for Stanley, some frozen thing for her, the dishes in the dishwasher, TV, bed. And the silent phone.

She sometimes imagined her son.

If she’d been a good mother – and of course she would have been –they’d have played trucks on the linoleum kitchen floor when he was small and gone Halloweening on chilly, moonlit nights. She’d have helped him with the hard spelling words and with his art and music (science and math would have been Stanley’s responsibility). And because she’d been that good mother, he’d have grown up to drop by for dinner on nights like tonight. She’d have cooked his favorite food: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, lima beans. (He would have loved lima beans.) And afterwards, he’d have given her a hand with the dishes and while she washed and he dried, maybe, they’d have laughed as he described how her granddaughters were the best spellers in school. A family tradition, he’d say, smiling down at her. And maybe they’d talk together about the time she taught him walk-the-dog with his yoyo and took him to the St. Louis Museum of Art. Which he’d hated.

He’d call, now and then, too, just to see how she was.

Because, in the entry hall lately, Frannie had been smelling something. Something like bad breath and stale clothes. Like unwashed hair. Like mothballs.

The scent of people growing old.

But tomorrow. Tomorrow smelled like hope.

CHAPTER 2

Frannie left so early for her hair appointment that she had time to kill, so she stopped by her favorite store. Still, crossing Aunt Teeks and Uncle Junks’ parking lot, she found herself explaining to the Stanley in her head for the umpteenth time, that she never spent much, really. Nice little things for the house, mostly: an antique cup and saucer; a dented brass warming pan once; a figurine; and if she was really lucky, every now and then, a painting. She loved paintings best. Especially of mothers and children.

And yes, she told that mental Stanley, I know what that means!

Closing Aunt Teeks’ jingly door behind her, it struck her, not for the first time, that thirty or forty years ago, antiques shops smelled like old people’s hatbands and mildewed attics. Now they smelled of lemon-scented furniture polish and, God … was that incense? No, just a terrible perfumed candle on the desk of a young man she’d never seen before. Minding the store for Sally, she supposed, although he seemed transfixed by the computer on his desk and barely looked up as she entered.

Frannie ventured a modest “hi” and a perfunctory smile that was meant to indicate her sincere hope of avoiding conversation. She really had only a half hour before her appointment.

He looked up at last and returned her smile. “Hi. How are you?” He’d closed his computer. Oh, dear.

“I’m good. In a hurry. On my way to an appointment. Just thought I’d stop by to see what Sally’s got in lately. I haven’t been in for a while.”

“Well, you just go right ahead and have a look around. Sally had to go to Ladue for a house call. But a lot of new things have come in recently. And if you want to see something, just ask.”

He bent to the reopened laptop.

Frannie moved deeper into the familiar shop and scanned its pegboard walls. She invariably checked the paintings first.

Over in the far corner. That, she thought. That looked new.

But from here, she couldn’t really see what it was. It might be just a reproduction. She thought she liked the frame, though. Kind of voluptuous. Darkened old gold with … too many chips for Stanley to let her live with? She picked her way through rocking chairs and side tables.

Close up, she could see it now, and it definitely looked like an old oil painting. Unusually dark, though, with a great many trees and several figures – really a lot of figures! And the whole thing was obscured by a uniform, caramel-like crust, so that even the parts that were obviously flesh were dense with a murky brown. But that had to be a good sign, Frannie thought, trying to edge closer. It had been hung above a squat china cabinet. Too high for her. Were they biblical characters? Gods? She looked around for a stool, found an old metal thing and placed it in front of the cabinet. Carefully, she stepped up.

Now she could make it out.

They weren’t gods at all, she was pretty sure. They were people, but only a few of them, half-seen through the bushes and trees, appeared to be dressed. In classical garments. Most of the figures, now she squinted, most of the figures were naked. Even the men. Moistening her index finger while covertly watching the boy at the desk, she swiped it across one large male figure. She was right. They were naked. And dancing. Some were – could they be drunk? And those four or five squatting men were, what? Rolling dice? But mostly, leaning away a bit, she could suddenly see, mostly they were making love. Having intercourse. Right out there in the open. And strangely, for a second or two, the scores of intertwined legs and arms and bodies actually seemed to be moving. Doing impossible, fascinating things.

Wait. Wait! She gripped the cabinet’s marble top. She had to be imagining this. She’d been doing a lot of that lately: reading sex into things when really nothing was happening at all. She felt mildly aroused now, though.

Stupid old woman.

Frannie fumbled in her handbag, found her glasses and stood on tiptoe for a better look. Buttocks and breasts and oh, yes, here … here was a couple wound together on the grass, and over there … another, halfway behind that tree! They weren’t moving anymore. She must have imagined it.

But all of a sudden, something in Aunt Teeks felt very wrong. Unnatural and wrong. Frannie yanked the glasses from her nose and stared around her. She was alone. No one else here but the boy, and he was lost in his machine. She felt faintly cold, however, and the light in the shop had somehow dimmed. Queer. And was it snowing outside? She peered through the windows. No. But March was a little late for snow, wasn’t it? Uneasy, she turned once again to the picture.

But now there was something about it that reminded her of … of what? Of something she’d seen once at school? Because it was really beautifully painted, she thought. Or at least, all of the hands were well done, and she remembered once reading – though it was probably untrue – that carefully rendered hands were one of the ways you could spot the work of a genuine artist. Each face was quite different from every other, too. That had to mean something. It was really well done, Frannie thought, smiling to herself, because it was lovely to find her art history alive and intact after so many years.

All of a sudden, she knew she had to own it. But as she began to reach for the price tag, she very distinctly felt that the young man at the desk was looking. And no doubt laughing at the old gal falling all over herself to check out the sex. She wouldn’t turn his way to see, but, stepping cautiously off the stool, Frannie smoothed the front of her good navy coat, adjusted its belt and moved a few feet off to devote a minute or more to a neighboring landscape. Narrowing her eyes and tilting her head from side to side, she scrutinized the canvas as she thought an art expert might. In case he was looking.

Could the naked picnic be an Old Master?

Weren’t all the good ones in museums?

But what did Frannie Turner know about art, actually?

Also, why would a genuine Old Master be in a Clayton antiques shop? Would a painting this good, this old, actually show up here, in this shopping mall? And what’s more, if it was really an Old Master, why hadn’t someone already bought it? Like Sally. Sally was the kind of dealer who prided herself on knowing everything about everything she sold. So if this thing was genuine, why hadn’t Sally already sold it or taken it home for herself?

Abandoning the depressing landscape, Frannie stepped up on the stool once again and reached for the yellow tag dangling from the frame. Leaning sideways, a little, she squinted to see: $3,500.00.

Well! That was why!

Ruefully, she left the stool, pushed it aside, removed a green glass vase from a nearby table and held it up to the light. She wasn’t looking at the vase, of course. She was thinking. If Sally hadn’t claimed that painting for herself, it was probably a reproduction of some kind. A photograph or a print of a genuine painting, most likely, fitted into this handsome old frame.

She was just deciding to go back and feel the surface to see if it felt smooth, like a print, or three-dimensional, like an oil, when her coat sleeve fell back and she caught the time.

She was going to be late.

Hurriedly, she stepped back on the footstool and ran her fingertips across its surface.

The painting felt rough.

So it hung in her mind as she pushed open the scarlet-framed glass door of The Hair House. Unhappily, she wasn’t moving fast enough to avoid her own reflection in the glass. Matronly, she realized. And tense, somehow. Really tense. Which seemed odd, considering how much she was looking forward to this.

Directed to a shiny pink bench by, yes, a twelve-year-old receptionist, Frannie tried to seem interested in last-week’s tattered People.

But at 2:35, as she was beginning to rehearse a courteously worded complaint, the receptionist trilled, “Mrs. Lerner? Randi’s ready for you? Just follow Ashley to the back?”

“Turner,” Frannie corrected softly, as, from nowhere, one of the several blonde girls appeared. This one was swinging a plastic water bottle in one hand and clutching a small sparkly phone in the other. She led Frannie to a curtained alcove.

“You can take your things off and leave them in there, Madame.” The girl sucked deeply on her bottle, looking neither at Fannie or ‘there.’ When you’re ready,” she added, daintily replacing its screw-top, “Randi will see you over here.” With one black-and-yellow-patterned fingernail, she indicated a closed velvet curtain just down the hall.

Frannie ducked into the cubicle and emerged in minutes, still tying the fastenings of the gown into the square knot she’d learned from Stanley’s sailing phase. With her pocketbook firmly on her arm, she crossed the hall and, still a little nervous – for no reason she could think of – she parted the heavy curtains.

The booth was considerably bigger than she’d expected it to be. Really spacious, in fact. With unusually patterned pink wallpaper (animals of some sort?) but far too many glaring lights. At its approximate center, an adjustable pink-leather chair on a pedestal faced a handsome Rococo mirror, beneath which were several French cabinets, all painted pink, and leaning against these cabinets, her scissors in hand, was Randi.

She wasn’t what Frannie had expected, either.

Randi was breathtaking.

All of six-and-a-half feet tall, she somehow seemed even taller. That’s what “majestic” must mean, Frannie thought.

She was thirty-ish, maybe, or younger. Or older. A widow’s peak punctuated a classic, heart-shaped face with wide-set, cat-green eyes, high-bridged nose, pillowy lips turning down ever so slightly at the corners – à la Hepburn – and not a trace of lipstick. None at all.

Frannie moistened her own dry lips.

Capping the whole effect was her hair: a gingery, bright red. Thick and wavy, it fell loose to her shoulders in ribbons of fiery soft curl.

Venus stood there, letting herself be looked at.

All fake, Frannie thought unkindly, blinking against the light.

Sour grapes, she rebuked herself, because. No. That nose. Those lips. Had to be real. Were real. And that hair had to be real, too, not just because of the eyebrows – an identical coppery hue – but because of that redhead-creamy skin. Not a freckle on it, either, Frannie noted. And all that along with a long, long neck, toned, slender arms and a wraparound cherry-red smock that more than suggested the body beneath: high breasts, wasp waist, wide hips, full thighs and slim (unstockinged) calves. Shiny and smooth, those calves; faintly muscled, like a runner’s. Narrow feet, too, Frannie saw, bound by strappy red sandals, metal-studded. With skyscraper heels.

No one looks like that, she thought hopelessly. No one’s that perfect. No. This Randi was someone out of nineteen-fifties Hollywood or a bad novel. But what was she doing here? Cutting hair? Why wasn’t she on magazine covers or doing the five o’clock weather?

Venus moved. And spoke. A level, alto purr.

“Mrs. Turner?” She searched Frannie’s face. “I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you.” She extended one child-soft hand.

“Oh Randi, thank you so much for seeing me so quickly. I know how in demand you are, and oh God, I couldn’t believe my good luck in getting this appointment. Thank you so much. I really mean it. I really appreciate this.”

She was babbling. She hated babbling.

“In fact,” Randi responded, smiling warmly, seeming not to notice, “when they told me it was you, I juggled my schedule. Because when I did your friend Arlene, you know – she told me about you – how you’d been girls together, how you’d both decided to ‘grow old gracefully’?” (Had that perfect lip curled?) “So I was really anxious to meet you in person. Why don’t you sit right here?” She indicated the pink throne.

“To meet me? Why?” Frannie asked, relaxing her too-substantial self into the chair. The seat gave softly. It was a little slippery.

“Oh, just because.” Randi answered. Soundlessly laying her scissors on the counter, she reached for a small black rattail comb and ran just the tip of one tapered index finger along its row of pointed teeth. Her nails were unpolished, virginal ovals. “Because it seemed you might be just the sort of challenge I like.”

“I did? It did?”

What on earth could Arlene have told Randi to make her seem like a “challenge”? Should she be flattered? Or offended?

“Let’s just have a look, then.”

Randi pushed herself away from the counter, stepped toward Frannie in one fluid move and then she was behind her, running the fine black comb through her hair. It pulled a little, once or twice, but it didn’t hurt. It felt almost soothing, actually … sliding smoothly down to the ends and back, down to the ends and back. Obscurely, Frannie felt cherished. Beloved. She sensed her eyelids beginning to droop.

“Nice hair. Not too thin, considering your age.” She heard the voice as if from a distance, and glancing up at the mirror, watched Randi watching herself as she combed her elderly client’s hair.

Smooth, and smooth again. Silk. She drifted away to that painting.

“This is a terrible cut for you, though, Mrs. Turner. Too severe. And aging, don’t you think?”

Aging. Behind half-closed eyes, the child in Frannie suffered a hurt, and for a moment, she couldn’t reply.

“So how would you like to look?” Randi asked.

Her eyes flew open.

How would she like to look?

In the mirror, she compared their reflections. Above her own face … lined and pasty, framed by her sparse and badly dyed hair, Randi’s great gorgeousness glowed. It didn’t glow. It burned.

This room, though. It was terribly bright, wasn’t it? Frannie looked down as, just off-center in her breast, she began to feel an alien something stir. Something she was terribly afraid of. It was only a kind of a … pang, at first. Then a bubble. Then a swelling of … oh God. Of yearning. It was yearning. She scrunched up her toes in her sneakers and reflexively smoothed her skirt to keep the intrusive thing down, and yet, panicky now, because she sensed it wouldn’t stay down, she distracted herself from the thing with a comma of hair on the floor’s clean white tiles: some little thing the broom had missed. And she’d opened her mouth to mention the hair, when she heard herself say, rather loud, in a voice that was nothing like her own, “I’d like to look young.”

“Young?” Randi grinned brilliantly as Frannie looked into their suddenly blurred mirror-image.

Oh God. Even her teeth were perfect.

“You mean younger than you are, Mrs. Turner?”

A balloon in her throat burst to flittered shreds and the terrible thing gushed out.

“I’d like to look young. I’d like to look young like the girls outside. Like you. I’d like to, you know … have a figure again. And these liver spots gone. I’d like my hands not to have all these … veins.” She fought down a childlike urge to sit on her hands. “And nice teeth like yours, but all my own. I mean, yes, it would be wonderful to be beautiful, too.” She tried to smile. “But more than that, maybe, I’d like to be young like girls are today. To have a job. Be paid. Be … sure of myself. Empowered, that’s the word! And attractive to men again. Oh, attractive to men! Even to sleep with anyone I liked.” She reddened, but Randi, seemingly transfixed by her own reflection, hadn’t noticed. Which was fine. The last thing Frannie needed at this moment was to be looked at.

“But almost more than that.” She fixed her eyes desperately on that curl, but nothing could stop her now. She was talking fast, too. To herself? To that spiral of hair? Certainly not to this fantastic creature behind her. And here it was, all in a rush … “I want more than anything in life, before I die, I want to find a man who’ll love me as much as I love him. Who’ll love me even more than I love him, perhaps. ” She lifted her head and found Randi’s sad eyes in the mirror now. Watching her.

“And one other thing.” Her heart seemed a fist of loss and pain, her lips felt dry and numb. “I wanted – want – to have a child.”

Omigod. Omigod. Despairingly, Frannie looked down at those ropy, capable, hands of hers, now clutching her skirt, now clutching her bulging thighs. Was this really her? Or was it some other her? And where was all this other stuff coming from? And in front of a stranger! Her face was all wet with saliva and tears. With both her hands she tried to rub it dry. She wanted to retch in shame.

Randi, watching her in the mirror now, leaned down and cupped Frannie’s shoulders in her hands. Her touch was welcome, yet intrusive. Frannie tried not to shrink away.

But Randi didn’t notice. Or noticed and didn’t care.

“Would you like something to drink, Mrs. Turner?” she asked, concerned. “I hate to see you so upset.”

Upset? That didn’t begin to describe all that Frannie was feeling, all that she’d vomited up. What she’d really like to drink wasn’t – well, it wasn’t likely to be in the icebox – no, the refrigerator – of The Hair House.

“Yes, I would,” she said in a second voice that wasn’t her own – this one, quavery and elderly— a voice that seemed sad in this all-too-intimate space. She swiped at the last of her tears and straightened, clearing her throat and attempting a laugh. “I’d love a vodka and tonic.”

Randi winked conspiratorially, then knelt in a singularly graceful motion and opened a cabinet door beneath the counter.

“Don’t tell them outside.” She giggled, brushing away her brazen hair. “I happen to have exactly that. Right here.”

Triumphantly, she rose and placed a sparkling cut-glass tumbler and an icy bottle of Grey Goose on the marble countertop. The two clinked slightly, and were followed shortly by a small bottle of tonic and a bright wedge of lime. Randi turned to pour the syrupy liquor into the tumbler, then squeezed the lime between finger and thumb and added the tonic. She watched as Frannie shakily took the drink, and then she spoke in a voice that sounded huskier than before.

“I actually do understand, Mrs. Turner. And I’ve been studying you since you first walked in and, you know, I can help you so much more than you can imagine. Because I agree: you could do with a real change. Not precisely a makeover, though. And definitely not your conventional makeover. That’s so hackneyed, like the type of thing they do on reality shows, you know? And not my style, in any case. What I think you really need is … a kind of vacation from yourself.”

Frannie had been sipping at her vodka. It was much too strong and far too early in the day, but it was helping.

“Yes, I might have several interesting things in mind for you, Mrs. Turner. But this morning – for now – let’s just begin with the hair.” In the mirror, Frannie saw Randi approach the chair again, the rattail comb in hand. She was smiling affectionately at Frannie’s reflection as she resumed her hypnotic combing. “Let’s just start with this hair.”

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